Incarnate
by Arya May
Summary: In its corners were etched promises and the cores of fallen stars, three betrayals and words that touched something inside me physically, like a shock from an endless blue. — the Nerevarine. Mild implied m/m.


_**Incarnate**_

**A/N: Well, I suppose I'm not dead after all. It's been busy lately with provincial exams and summer courses and whatnot, so I haven't really done anything over summer at all. Except for work my ass off = =;**

**Anyhow, before we get into this fanfic, I'd like to clear some things up. This is obviously a Morrowind fanfic, so those of us familiar with the main plot would know of the random disturbing dreams that you get along the Main Quest when you try to sleep. I kind of wanted to expand on this idea, but instead of just "creepy guy with mask" scaring the fuck out of your main character like he did in the game (just read the journal entries lol) perhaps Dagoth Ur tried more tact. **

**Oh, and there's heavily implied Voryn/Nerevar here. Keep in mind that this is the Nerevarine narrating, so he/she (I never specified on the gender) says often that it's not them that the dreams were intended for, but rather who they once were. I'm sure you get what he/she means by that considering for some reason every ash creature you fight or when you get a chance, talk to via Calm and also in every dream you recieve, you are referred to as "Lord Nerevar" instead of your name. Which is funny, if you're playing as a girl.**

* * *

I remember the Void; its face was vast and insincere.

In this realm of abstractions that no longer held any meaning, I had wandered often as a seeker of memories which had long since blown by, passing shards of nostalgia that I knew had carried implication in another life. I sat at its feet, a foreigner in dreaming, dreams and the sleepless. Sometimes it whispered to me in ways that only a corrupt god could, practicing persuasion in such a way that realization could only mean deceit. Its face was carved in effigy, a monolithic shell of a soul that _somehow_ I think I recognized in blind delusion.

In its right hand sat a sword, and in its left was balanced a weight that dangled precariously above a smoldering pit, one which I think only led to all the masks that concealed the identity of damnation. When it spoke, it had always seemed like serpents had slithered out of the abyssal sky.

Once, it- _he_- had avowed to me, and tried to show me the gifts of artificial Omniscience. _There are many rooms in the house of the Master. Be easy, for from the hands of your enemies I have delivered you. _

(And I had awoken like as if I had fled from the perpetual darkness of Sithis, for- oh, it was not Good.)

I admit that it sounds like the citations of a myth, one that has been so heavily drenched in macabre carmine that it no longer holds a scrap of its original intention. In its corners were etched promises and the cores of fallen stars, three betrayals and words that touched something inside me physically, like a shock from an endless blue. Indeed, at times I am tempted to lie to myself; find reassurance within the divides of self indulgence. Perhaps I would have, like so many, if it had not been a practice that I had always disdained.

It's not _me_ that he talks to when he sends those dreams, but only the amnesiac mind of who I supposedly _was_ in an era so long ago, that it's now convoluted with contradictions and breaks in the very fibre of time's continuum. His ego demanded that I come willingly, though whether pride or fear or sheer regards for _what was_ were questions that I could not answer.

And neither did I wish; it was not always nightmares that he sent me. Sometimes he showed me visions of nonsense that would leave a mark on my heart as I awoke, and a feeling of strange emotion that I did _not_ feel, but at the same time _did_.

He appealed to my senses, gave dormant thoughts life again, and it had not been a miscalculation when none was needed at all. During moments like that, he would no longer be the Sharmat and the twisted Maker of the crippling Blight, an entity who was ripped apart and then reconstructed by the black magicks of Lorkan. He would wear the image of one who had died the moment the Heart's power had touched his soul.

His mannerisms often made _that_ part of me nauseated with an anguish that the present I would not feel. Nevertheless to say, it was difficult to swallow back the sickness, and force Truth back into its empty recluse.

_To mend what we were would be a task that would be unworthy of my power. We Loved one another once, Lord Nerevar. Let us forge it anew, flawless and unwavering._

The first time I had risen from one of _those_ dreams, I had stumbled in disorientation for the rest of the day as the soul that I was incarnated to contain searched in vain for an entity that was not there.

_Four thousand years might stand between us, and your new body, but I know who you are._

Whatever remained of my rationality screamed warnings at his disastrous revelation. It gripped me in the deadliest of fingers, unwilling to let me face the epiphany that he had now brought forth for torment.

_For your mind does not remember, but your spirit shall._

If nothing else, Nerevar did remember _in memento_, and sometimes I truly hated him for it.

It is ironic to say that, I realize- detesting playing the part of a mortal vessel for one who was destined by prophecy to be such as he was. It was a weakness, one that I could not afford to uphold, but it was not I who was in control of my pathos when confronted. I think the false Dreamer realized this along the way, and learned quickly how to exploit this to his liking. When- I believe, it was apparent that I still had no intention of joining his ranks, amusement and perhaps just the slightest grain of anecdotal nostalgia were his replacements for reasons.

Of course he never gave up. In his own words, it was better to have me as a friend rather than an enemy.

He would show me the old lands of Vvardenfell, before Azura had cursed our race with ashen skin, and memories of those glory days when the I from millennia past united our clans into one single entity. He would show me the past in a time where history failed to record, when we had still been children free from responsibility and the world. He knew how to manipulate my feelings- no, pardon that, _Nerevar_'s feelings almost as well today as he could when both of them were still living and he was still Voryn, not yet the demon which the Heart had shaped.

He would show me Love and all its intricate fantasies, and moments from long past that made me flush with guilt and all the pleasure as was conveyed during those forgotten nights. I realize that this sounded almost disturbing, almost frightening, but then again, I was only mortal, even with the soul of the Godkiller contained within me. Vague segments of myself started to remember, amidst the recollections. Sometimes just out traveling I would have _visions_ that would shift over in the barest of seconds, and the color of my skin would resemble a golden hue before reverting back to the normal grey that it had always been when I blinked. Sometimes words would come out from my mouth that would not make sense, containing knowledge that I would have never been able to know. Sometimes I feared what would happen if I let this progress; and the outcomes if it should.

But then the Dreams stopped, all of a sudden, like if they had been nothing. I was confused at first, and still am, but I had no way to explain the ultimate _why_ it was so.

_Don't think too much on it, _Mehra had warned, _the Temple condemns those who do._

It did not stop me from climbing the citadels of what remained of the Sixth House, nor did this meaningless sentiment- as it was intended to, I should believe, make me switch my sides against the Blight and join hands with the corrupted form of my old friend, now fallen. In that was a fatal miscalculation on his part, an arrogance that had been overlooked in confidence. Lorkan had destroyed too much of what he once was for him to still understand the mechanisms of the rest of the world.

His corrupted psyche, irretrievable. The vase that is in too many pieces to glue. Nerevar understood that too, as much as I had felt he did. We were after all, just separate parts of an entity that was Whole.

Perhaps he wonders if I still remember him, not as the monster in Red Mountain, but back then when he was still Voryn, in the high days of Resdaynia. The truth is that I do not, even though I tried- and failed. What I did come to realize was an unconscious instinct of what once was, and now nothing more but doubt and regret.

Instinct was not what shaped Empires, nor birthed them, nor killed them.

How painfully blind were the eyes of a god.

Sometimes I think that we were like the remnants of Wrath, forever bound in a chain of self annihilation that would inevitably result in the destruction of both the primordial and the finale. The weight of the prophecies and the weight of my homeland's survival, pitted against a mockery of the divine in a war that had been fought since that day four thousand years ago in the Heart's chamber, which is also where things must conclude.

But I had always been fatalistic enough, and with reason to be so. In the past this Wrath had been put down, and smothered under a layer of all consuming aberration.

I like to think I will leave things here, half filled half empty.

So it was, and so it should be. Is this where things begin, or inevitably end?


End file.
